2006-01-23

A Welsh mathematician has discovered that January 23rd, 2006 is the most depressing day of the year. You factor in the Weather, your damned poor salary, your overwhelming Debt, its not Too long after Christmas, the fact that you haven't Quit smoking or having unprotected sex or skydiving or lying or any of the resolutions you made December 31st, you aren't really Motivated to do anything, and you need to do something, anything, but instead of taking action you're instead succumbing to the temptation of iNAction. The actual date is supposed to be January 24th, but that was last year when you didn't have to do a mid-week correction: Monday is the worst day of the week, you see.Most of the newspapers around here are busy giggling that our Governor General, on advice from Paul Martin, chose this date for our federal election (oh, is there an election on?) As a brilliant scientist myself, I think the more important consequence of this formula is the fact that there aren't a lot of Welsh mathematicians...

So after listening to Sarah Slean's CD 4 times in a row yesterday (the hazards of giving people music for Christmas is they might just want to play the music for you), its only fair that today I discover she has a blog on the MacLeans.ca site. Fortunately, she has decided not to give us her "musicians" take on the vote. (Why is it that with the notable exceptions -- Lars Ulrich, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, Rush, Dr. Dre, and Oingo Boingo come to mind -- the musical world is so far left they make Naomi Klein blush? There'll probably be a pretty substantial rant about this one day. I wonder if people are keeping a list of "rants I'm supposed to make but haven't yet" promises? Maybe I should start one on the sidebar. Pro-active, and all that.)

Another mini-rant motivated by the anonymous first comment to this post. (I say "anonymous first comment" in the hopes that someday there are more comments than the 1 so far.. which is probably the 3rd comment ever) "There is way more than 800 same sex couples in a city of 1 million" he claims. Well, the Journal article quoted relies on, you know, the actual statistics rather than just a wild guess. How does one suspect there are "way more than 800"? There really aren't that many fudgepackers in this city (too many, perhaps, but that's a given). If I didn't have to know anybody from the University of Alberta Faculty of Arts I probably wouldn't personally know more than 5, and 4 of them I could stop knowing by simply going back in time and finding myself a better minimum wage job. The other one was LUG anyways, based on the fact that she's quite pregnant and happy at this point in her life. Anyways, the first thing the fairie-defenders try to say when you find some actual statistics is that its underrepresented. Usually some BS argument about "living in fear" comes up. (If you want to "live in fear" in Canada in 2006 you'll lie on forms about your dislike of pillow biters, not about your lifestyle as one). So why can't everybody else start pulling this stunt. For example, polls of Alberta Separatism range from about 18% to about 38%, but I think that these people are just scared to admit to pollsters what they really feel: straw polls done by people I know in the Edmonton region find in the under-30 crowd a 70%+ support level. So there you go. A majority of Albertans want to separate. They just are afraid to say so... in case the person doing the survey is a cocksucker...